Kernels like Linux’s or BSD’s are still written in C. Why haven’t they moved to C++? Is it something in the OO paradigm?
Bjarne: It’s mostly conservatism and inertia. In addition, GCC was slow to mature. Some people in the C community seem to maintain an almost willful ignorance based on decade-old experiences. Other operating systems and much systems programming and even hard real-time and safety-critical code has been written in C++ for decades. Consider some examples: Symbian, IBM’s OS/400 and K42, BeOS, and parts of Windows. In general, there is a lot of open source C++ (e.g., KDE).
You seem to equate C++ use with OO. C++ is not and was never meant to be just an object-oriented programming language. I wrote a paper entitled “Why C++ is not just an
Object-Oriented Programming Language” in 1995; it is available online.* The idea was and is to support multiple programming styles (“paradigms,” if you feel like using long words) and their combinations. The most relevant other paradigm in the context of high-performance and close-to-the-hardware use is generic programming (sometimes abbreviated to GP). The ISO C++ standard library is itself more heavily GP than OO through its framework for algorithms and containers (the STL). Generic programming in the typical C++ style relying heavily on templates is widely used where you need both abstraction and performance.
I have never seen a program that could be written better in C than in C++. I don’t think such a program could exist. If nothing else, you can write C++ in a style close to that of C. There is nothing that requires you to go hog-wild with exceptions, class hierarchies, or templates. A good programmer uses the more advanced features where they help more directly to express ideas and do so without avoidable overheads.
Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming
Bjarne: It’s mostly conservatism and inertia. In addition, GCC was slow to mature. Some people in the C community seem to maintain an almost willful ignorance based on decade-old experiences. Other operating systems and much systems programming and even hard real-time and safety-critical code has been written in C++ for decades. Consider some examples: Symbian, IBM’s OS/400 and K42, BeOS, and parts of Windows. In general, there is a lot of open source C++ (e.g., KDE).
You seem to equate C++ use with OO. C++ is not and was never meant to be just an object-oriented programming language. I wrote a paper entitled “Why C++ is not just an
Object-Oriented Programming Language” in 1995; it is available online.* The idea was and is to support multiple programming styles (“paradigms,” if you feel like using long words) and their combinations. The most relevant other paradigm in the context of high-performance and close-to-the-hardware use is generic programming (sometimes abbreviated to GP). The ISO C++ standard library is itself more heavily GP than OO through its framework for algorithms and containers (the STL). Generic programming in the typical C++ style relying heavily on templates is widely used where you need both abstraction and performance.
I have never seen a program that could be written better in C than in C++. I don’t think such a program could exist. If nothing else, you can write C++ in a style close to that of C. There is nothing that requires you to go hog-wild with exceptions, class hierarchies, or templates. A good programmer uses the more advanced features where they help more directly to express ideas and do so without avoidable overheads.
Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming
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